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Johnny Foreigner & Hype Management

Hype Management is probably the name of an agency somewhere in London. I apologise to them profusely.

Johnny Foreigner are an absolutely brilliant indie-punx band from Bi(u)rmingham, UK. Their debut LP Waited Up ‘Til It Was Light was a blistering but weirdly tender plummet down off-kilter guitars and since then, they’ve gone from strength to strength, culminating in the phenomenal, all-encompassing, what-is-being-young Johnny Foreigner Vs Everything in 2011. Lex, Kel, Jun & Lewes are incredible live, too.

They’re the sort of band where calling them hard-working seems a bit shoddy, because they so blatantly don’t see music as a job and that adjective is usually reserved for people like Elbow who aren’t that special but release a lot of music, but they absolutely work damn, damn hard, on top of being enormously talented and very special indeed.

More than anything, though, they’re clever. I’ve heard their new album, You Can Do Better, and it’s sublime. It’s a record that’s as thrilling as it is sweet, and ninth track “Le Schwing” is so joyous it hurts. I’ll be covering the new album for By Volume in the coming week, and I hope to be a tiny part of a huge explosion of love, the simultaneous glow that lights up the Internet when something new and exciting is clickable, is shareable, is like(love!)able. You Can Do Better is out March 10th, and the band are desperate to bottle up the waiting so that when it fizzes over there’s a real bang. In the past, Johnny Foreigner have distributed fake versions of a record through their fanbase and written at length about the importance of this anticipation for up-and-coming bands like them.

At the time of writing – and to my knowledge – everyone who has heard this album has respected the boundaries that everyone should always respect forever. Fostering a network of people you trust like that is essential to building anticipation in a product or an idea. A couple of years ago, I wrote at length about how I would despair and lay down my arms if Johnny Foreigner Vs Everything didn’t take the mainstream. Here’s to hoping that the pressure building this time shakes the city to its core.